List Order

This how how one customer is forced to respond to the bad design that CC recently changed with the "Contacts" pages. Just in order to make my Email Lists show up (in the left column) in the order that is important and logical to us (not the ABC order that CC engineers/designers decided to force the customers), I have to change each Email List to bear 1, 2, 3.... numerical numbers at the head of the list name. So, instead of titling an email list "Engineers" or "Marketing", for example, we now have to title them "1 Marketing" and "3 Engineers", to avoid the CC default of alphabetical list order. We will see if this will alleviate the poor design of CC team. Another way to cope with this is to simply start shopping for other email marketing vendors. Words for all IT and Web designers: There is something seriously wrong with your approach and design decisions if your new advanced design or technology forces the customers to retreat to the non-technology 19th century tactics just to use your product!!

I am amazed that you have taken a cumbersome process and made it even worse.
The search should work for the lists and if it searched contacts it should 1. specify "search contacts" 2. it should search the list you chose, not all. In addition you should be able to better sort lists. I should be able to search them, sort them by date created, and file them away in folders.
Also when you are sending an email and you "search" the list it doesn't work. Call SLI Systems for help with you crappy search.
As an additional suggestion there also should be a very easy way to A/B test or do a multivariate test on emails. Then I wouldn't have to be creating so many lists.

We released an improvement yesterday (January 22) that should help you.

You can access the list view by going to the Contacts tab and clicking "Email Lists" on the left side of the screen. This view will display your email lists (up to 500 on a page if you like), sort by any of the displayed columns, including date the list was created, and allow you search for a list, easily rename a list or select one or more lists to delete them. You'll also just have more room to view your lists, particularly important if you have a lot of lists or user longer list names.

Also, if one or a few lists are your most "important" lists (you use them frequently, want to make sure that others who use your account see them first when sending emails, etc.), you can click the star next to a list to "favorite" it. Your favorite lists will always appear at the top when you're selecting to which lists to send your emails, adding new contacts, or adding existing contacts to a list.

Thank you for bearing with us as we worked on getting these features to you. We look forward to your feedback on how useful they are to you.

We just released yesterday some improvements - a new "list view" - that should help with getting lists in the order you want them.

You can access the list view by going to the Contacts tab and clicking "Email Lists" on the left side of the screen. This view will display your email lists (up to 500 on a page if you like) and allow you search for a list, easily rename a list or select one or more lists to delete them. You'll also just have more room to view your lists, particularly important if you have a lot of lists or user longer list names.

Also, if one or a few lists are your most "important" lists (you use them frequently, want to make sure that others who use your account see them first when sending emails, etc.), you can click the star next to a list to "favorite" it. Your favorite lists will always appear at the top when you're selecting to which lists to send your emails, adding new contacts, or adding existing contacts to a list.

Thank you for bearing with us as we worked on getting these features to you. We look forward to your feedback on how useful they are to you.

Karin - You can do this now. When you click the Contacts tab, click the Email List link on the left side of the page. This will bring you into a new lists view (new as of 1/22). You can sort on any of the column headers here, so you can sort on the list creation date to see them in chronological order.

Also, if you typically have a few more important or frequently used lists, I recommend using the new "favoriting" feature -- click the star next to the list name to mark it as a favorite. These favorites will always appear at the top of your lists, including when you're adding contacts and choosing what list they should be on and when you're sending emails.

Thanks for this feedback. It sounds like the search functions you are looking for are available within Advanced Search. To use this click the main contacts page and then the "Advanced" link under the search tool.

I am really really upset. You have made my life now harder because my contact lists are not in order by time but in alphabetical..... moving forward I now have to name by lists to include time as the titles are pretty repetitive, but before time was allowable in my search, now that you have alphabetized my lists I don't have a hope of finding the list I want! I do not like this change! I hope that you will allow us to order our lists when we are looking for them.

I use custom html code to create my emails. When I go to "select lists" after finishing an email the lists are automatically sorted by the date they were created (oldest to newest) and you cannot change this. In the old contact interface I could edit the display order of each list so that I could manually force them to appear alphabetically, but with your new contact interface I'm now stuck selecting the lists from a "date created" sorting which is a HUGE pain in the but for me. Please give us custom html users a way to sort the contact lists after finishing an email!!!!!!!!!

Very difficult to use, hard to locate files that had been available according to date added. Knew the numbers of the lists I needed to use. The new add contacts is very difficult to see if information is correct - does not pull enough examples to view.
Please change it back. This is very very cumbersome.

I cannot find how to order the list of emails on my Subscribe page. They are now suddenly in alphabetical order, which puts the least important list at the top and the most important one toward the bottom. I can't find how to select the default list, either.

When I sort by date to see who has signed up today, the contacts view is showing people who signed up yesterday with today's date. I get that CC is based in the UK (I am assuming) and that I am in the States, but when I go into individual contacts, the dates do not match what is in the contact list view. The two should match each other, either on UK time or on my time.

Yes, but I can't now do with this new system is order the lists in order of importance. So now subscribers are acting differently, signing up for my least profitable list rather than my most profitable. When I could order the lists, I could somewhat influence their sign up behavior. That is now gone.

And now, apparently, I can no longer set a default list because I have several lists.

Thanks for your reply. Currently, the lists cannot be ordered like in the old Contact Management tool wherein you can assign lists to order 1-10 and so on. Please continue to share your feedback on this so we can look into adding it back.

You can, however, still customize which lists appear on the form to influence your contacts' sign up behavior. Here are the steps on how you can set that up:

After logging into Constant Contact, click Contacts > Sign-Up Tools.

Click the name of the form you want to edit.

Scroll down to check the lists you want to display and uncheck any you want to hide.

All that does is put lists on the sign up page. That does not influence sign up behavior, except that obviously people won't sign up for lists that they do not see. Numbering the lists so I could put the most important one at the top did influence sign up behavior. I can no longer do that or even select a default list.

I understand what you're referring to. And yes, that feature of ordering the list on your account and on your sign-up form so you can influence visibility is not available in the new Contacts tool at this time. I have submitted your request to restore this functionality. We have a feedback system that drives which features are prioritized and restored in future updates.

We really appreciate your input and we apologize for the inconvenience caused by the new changes.

Hi there-
Since the redesign of lists totally rearranged our list layout, we've been trying to reorder them using numbers and alphabetizing. I assigned our most used lists the numbers 1-11, and your system alphabetizes them as:
1, 10, 11, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
In what world does that make sense?!

Thank you for supplying your feedback to us. It is very important, and we highly value your opinion. They system is using a true "Alphabetical" sorting, and it is not taking into account the numerical order your are trying to store.

In the mean time, continue to vote for the changes tha tyou want to see made isnide of the account. Please don't hesitate to let us know any time you have questions, more information, or any feedback to give us!

The Email Lists display in Contact Management section is not most user friendly. We have several lists with rather long names, so the space in the left-hand column given to the lists names/folders is not wide enough. I never even use this view.
A user of ConstantContact since 2007 and a former UI designer, I think that the old interface was much simpler, more intuitive and gave more information with less clicks.

Thank you for supplying your feedback to us. It is very important, and we highly value your opinion.

Currently there is no way to adjust the order in which the email lists appear on your signup form. The system defaults that sorting to alphabetical. We have passed along details on the ability to sort lists on your signup form, that you would like to see. In the mean time, there is no way to adjust that. One thing you can do, is create "labels" for each of your lists.

To clarify, if you labeled all of your state lists as "State - (State Name)", the system in turn would automatically group all the "State" lists together, and then sort alphabetically based on the actual state name that was used after you inserted the label.

If you have any questions on this, more information, or any feedback to give us, please don't hesitate to let us know. We are here and happy to help.

Bring back the ability or order lists. Not all our lists are public and having the ability to order them allows for lists to be sorted in a meaningful way. Under the new system I am forced to manipulate Alpha sorting to bring order back. Please add ordering back to the lists

I need to be able to move my lists into the order I use them - NOT a default to alphabetical. This change is very inconvenient and has wasted so much of my time that I am not using constant contact as often.

We have 70+ Email Lists and in the previous design, we carefully assigned priorities to make them show up on the page in the order that was most useful for us.
The new "Email List" design took that capability away and now it lists my email lists by the email list name, the number of contacts, and date when the list was created --- totally useless sorting categories when you have more than a few email lists.
Imagine that I had a chest drawer and I had nicely arranged my accessories and clothes in it, in the way that is most useful to me (customer). Your engineers stuck their hands in my drawer, stirred my contents and left them in total jumble. That is what you have done here!
Here, your engineers thought that all lists must be sorted out by its name, the size, and date. They totally failed to understand real customers use your products. The failed to understand that the function of "Email Lists" is very different from that of "Contact Lists".
With Contacts, you want to sort by the date the customer joined the subscription, customer name, their interest, etc. With Email Lists, sorting by the list name is totally useless because users assign the list name that best represents the interest of the particular list or group; they don't assign Email List, thinking "I have to start the list name with 0 or A in order for this list to show up on the top." Also, the Email List may have a small number of Contacts (subscribers), but it might be an important Email List for the user. Sorting by "Date Created" is useless, it is like sorting your mobile phone by the date that you purchased.
The left column of the page https://ui.constantcontact.com/rnavmap/distui/contacts, I see another "Email Lists" that can be moved up and down. But now I have to reorganize my 70+ lists -- what a waste of my time! In the previous Email Lists design, your users have already assigned the priorities of list categories. Why didn't you apply the user priority? Why did you ignore your customers' expressed priority setting and replaced with what engineers think customers want (which is usually wrong).
I am so unhappy with this new design. This one is a serious game changer. We are courted seriously by the competitors of Constant Contact, we get flyers and emails every week. If you cannot bring back my old Email Lists design soon, we will switch -- because now it is taking me more than 60 minutes to set up a simple email campaign that I was able to do in 10 minutes previously.

This newer contact system for adding contact takes more steps than previous system. Don't like it. We used to be able to add people directly to lists that we wanted them in. And we used to have numbers associated with our lists which we new "this list was #8", etc. Now that is gone. We need the simpler views back.

The Contact lists are organized by alpha in your new version. This isn't how I'd like to see them. I organized them by how often I use them. I can't find the settings that would allow me to organize the list how I see fit.

When I click "Contacts" tab, the new design defaults on listing the subscribers in ABC order. Just to check on the newest subscribers, I have to click the gear-shaped setting button, then click on "Name, Details, Date added, etc". There is no way to set my preference. We send an initial newsletter with specific topic tailored for each new subscriber. So, just to see new subscribers, I have to repeat this cumbersome steps each time I log on.
To add the newest subscribers to a specific email list (subcategories that best fit their interest and expertise), first I have to un-click "Make Email Lists my default view," then click the "Contacts" tab again to see my Email Lists, which are now organized ABC order that totally disregarded the email list priorities which I had set in the old design and does not make sense at all.
Just to locate the specific Email List where I want to add the new subscriber, it now takes me 15 minutes -- I used to do this in less than 30 seconds!!
When web usability is moving toward how to help the visitor do a task with less clicks and less time, your design team managed to do the opposite. What is Constant Contact thinking?

We have dozens of Email Lists because we're a long time customer of CC and because of the inadequate file management provided, we have been using Email List as sub-categories for marketing reasons.
The new design lists our Email Lists by the alphabetical name of the list. This put the least useful Email Lists on the top 10 and buries our most important Email Lists among several dozens, making it impossible to find the right Email List that I want to use.
To make the important Email Lists show up on the top fold of the screen using CC's "updated" new design, I had to resort to an idiotic 19th century method of re-naming the list by using 00, 01, 011, 02, etc.
However, now these idiotic numerical Email Lists Names now show up on the Opt-in page that new subscribers see. This is unacceptable.
When assigning an Email campaign Name, we can set our own "internal" nickname for the particular campaign, and we can set a formal email name that our subscribers see when they receive the newsletter email. Why can't you give us this same option for naming the Email Lists?

Before the recent update of "Contacts" page design, we were able to set priorities (numbers) to each Email List (most of us have multiple), allowing the most important Email List(s) to show up on the top of the list, both when we select which group to send a particular marketing email, as well as on the Opt-in page where new subscribers select which email lists they want to join.
The new design destroyed these user-set priorities. As a result, new subscribers will see the Email Lists (topics from their perspective) that are not their 1st priority topic that prompted them to sign up for our newsletter. They have to scroll down among many.
For us the account administrator, this also made it impossible to quickly select the Email Lists to send a particular campaign, because now we have to scroll down a tiny window in which our Email Lists are listed by the order that CC engineers wanted, rather than I as a customer wanted.
Unless this is fixed, or CC gives us an option to use the old design where you could easily and quickly see all of our Email Lists in one big page in the priority that we had set, we will begin looking for CC competitors who have better design.

Since the new contact management was added in May, I can't figure out to add one contact email to a list. Also, the lists are now alphabetized and I like to see them by date, but it is not easy to find out how to do that. I looked in help but I don't find info on the new system.
How do I add just one contact manually to a list I have been using for awhile.

We had our Contact Lists in a specific order that made it easy to find our lists. It worked for our business. Now you took that away and I can not easily find the list I need. It would be great to have the option to reorder our lists in list properties again.

It used to be possible to sort a list and display variable quantities of contacts per page, i.e. 100. Then one could select only those contacts on that page by checking a "box." Now it appears I can't change quantity displayed nor can I select only those contacts on the display page. Now only able to select each contact individually or all on the list. That is 5,500 or the cumbersome method of checking individual contacts. I hope this is not the case. Please advise.